In a first-of-its-kind study, Weill Cornell Medicine researchers found that female physicians, primary care physicians, psychiatrists and physicians in non-rural areas delivered relatively higher proportions of visits via telehealth. This national analysis may provide key information for policymakers to consider as COVID-19 provisions for expanded Medicare telehealth coverage are set to expire at the end of this year.
Dr. Jiani Yu (left) and Dr. Dhruv Khullar
The study, published Sept. 3 in Health Affairs, compared rates of remote care visits among Medicare-billing physicians using data collected in 2022, two years after the pandemic began. The research was led by first author Dr. Jiani Yu, assistant professor of population health sciences, and senior author Dr. Dhruv Khullar, assistant professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Through Medicare, millions of Americans have come to rely on telehealth, which allows health care professionals to deliver care through phone calls, video calls, or online chat services.
The researchers showed that telehealth use varied by specialty, with 23 percent of psychiatrists in the study delivering nearly all their visits virtually. They also found lower rates of telehealth delivery in rural areas; even as prior work suggests that rural areas are disproportionately likely to experience primary care shortages.
When studying different patient groups, they found that Black patients, Hispanic patients, patients dually enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid and patients with multiple medical conditions used relatively higher levels of telehealth care. Primary care physicians who delivered more of their care via telehealth tended to care for higher proportions of medically and socially complex patients.
As policy makers consider the future of virtual care, they may benefit from a deeper and more granular understanding of the patients and clinicians who would be most affected by policy changes. “We will also investigate the impacts of telehealth access on patient outcomes and health care spending in order to further inform policy discussions about extending telehealth coverage policies,” Dr. Yu said.